Desire As Medicine Podcast
Catherine & Brenda interview people and talk to each other about desire. They always come back to us being 100% responsible for our desires.
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catherine@catherinenavarro.com
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Desire As Medicine Podcast
54 ~ Belly Wisdom with Elaine Konopka
What if the key to unlocking your deepest wisdom lies in your belly? Join us on this episode of Desire is Medicine as we welcome Elaine, an extraordinary somatic practitioner and writer whose journey spans dancing, choreography, and life as a Zen nun.
Elaine shares her innovative approach to healing through conscious breathing, body awareness, and reflective writing. Catherine recounts her own transformative experiences of working with Elaine, emphasizing her deep compassion and unique ability to address both physical and emotional issues. Brenda's enthusiasm for belly health sparks a rich discussion on body awareness and healing, setting the stage for a profound exploration of the wisdom our bellies hold.
Together, we unpack the complicated relationship many women have with their bellies, shaped by societal pressures and personal experiences. From the humorous yet poignant "Miller curse" to the impact of habits like holding in the belly, we discuss the importance of body acceptance and the victories over such constricting habits. We also delve into the lower abdomen's connection to intuition and its role in decision-making. Elaine guides us through understanding how fear and desire originate from the belly, influencing our actions and experiences in profound ways.
We also touch on the deeply personal journeys of embracing unique bodies, from post-pregnancy body acceptance to living with post surgery bellies. By challenging restrictive societal norms, we promote self-love and highlight practices like yoga, Tai Chi, and Qigong, showcasing the belly as a source of power and healing.
Through personal stories and practical practices, we celebrate bellies, and the necessity of being kind and attentive to our bodies, emphasizing the ongoing journey of healing and self-acceptance. Join us as we honor the wisdom within and embrace our bellies with compassion and love.
Connect with Elaine
Info and bookings: www.elainekonopka.com
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Email:
desireasmedicine@gmail.com
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catherine@catherinenavarro.com
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@desireasmedicinepodcast
@Brenda_Fredericks
@CoachCatherineN
Welcome to Desire is Medicine. We are two very different women living a life led by desire, inviting you into our world.
Speaker 2:I'm Brenda. I'm a devoted practitioner to being my fully expressed true self in my daily life. Motherhood relationships and my business Desire has taken me on quite a ride and every day I practice listening to and following the voice within. I'm a middle school teacher turned coach and guide of the feminine.
Speaker 1:And I'm Catherine, devoted to living my life as the truest and hopefully the highest version of me. I don't have children, I've never been married. I've spent equal parts of my life in corporate as in some down and low shady spaces. I was the epitome of tired and wired and my path led me to explore desire. I'm a coach, guide, energy worker and a forever student, even after decades of inner work.
Speaker 2:We are humble beginners on the mat, still exploring, always curious. We believe that listening to and following the nudge of desire is a deep spiritual practice that helps us grow.
Speaker 1:On the Desires Medicine podcast. We talk to each other, we interview people we know and love about the practice of desire, bringing in a very important piece that is often overlooked being responsible for our desire, piece that is often overlooked being responsible for our desire. Welcome, friends, welcome back to another episode of the Desire as Medicine podcast. Today we have a very special guest. Her name is Elaine, and Elaine and I have done some amazing work together. She's a new practitioner that I'm working with. I actually met her in Paris when you guys you know that I was with Olivia in Paris. Yay, and I actually met Elaine through Olivia, which is even more exciting. Meeting someone through your BFF is always the best. So let me start off by giving you like Elaine's formal bio here.
Speaker 1:She is a somatic practitioner and writer. Over the past 15 years, she has helped thousands of clients around the world live healthier, fuller, freer lives by teaching them to work with their bodies rather than against them, to recognize and transform the past when it appears as an unhelpful reaction in the present Don't we all know that? And to cultivate the natural intensity and healing force of their bodies. She's a passionate believer in the power of written word. She facilitates writing for well-being programs for individuals and groups to help develop a deeper connection with themselves and the world around them by putting their experience into words, them by putting their experience into words.
Speaker 1:She's American-based in France. Elaine has also taught the magic of conscious breathing, body awareness and reflective writing in cultural structures. If you don't know what that means, it's theaters, museums, dance centers, corporate settings like Dior, ikea, and to members of under-resourced communities. Her many air quotes past lives include dancer and choreographer, cocktail waitress, journalist, translator and Zen. Nun, I don't think I've ever spoken to her about that, just for everybody to know. So if you have questions, don't bring them to me, you're going to have to write her directly.
Speaker 1:She is currently putting the finishing touches on an anthology of her essays. We will be putting her bookings and your ability to sign up to her newsletter in the show notes and to make this a little more personal, as we do on this show, I'm just gonna talk and say Olivia used to talk about her time with Elaine and it always sounded fantastic and I was like I want to see this woman. So I go and I'm going to bring you with me now. It's um, we've already done Ambrosia, we had the retreat, olivia and I and I go to see Elaine. It's like the last few days that I'm in Paris and I'm sitting on her table and she's looking at my feet and she's like so this is happening in your stomach and this that the other and I was like this is fantastic. This woman's like talking to me about my belly from my feet. I'm like Brenda is going to die when I tell Brenda what's going on?
Speaker 1:right now she's just going to be like what? Blown open, and I have to tell you guys, it was really a mind open kind of blown open experience for me as well. We've been working together since then as well, virtually, and I'm blown away by this woman's compassion, by the depth of her knowledge, by her ability to be with me in every breath and notice, like when my forehead wrinkles, when I'm not breathing into my chest or my belly evenly. The depth of her knowledge is really what was screaming like. We need to bring her, as we do so many subjects, out into the world so more people can know what this is like. Welcome, elaine, so happy to have you here today. Thank you for saying yes that's an amazing introduction.
Speaker 3:Thank you, catherine I.
Speaker 1:I couldn't say no yay, she couldn't say no guys no thanks to both of you for having me. We are so psyched to have you and, um, I'm going to be passing the mic to Brenda. Hey, brenda, because we really want to talk about all things belly and Brenda really has, um, some personal I I, what's the word I'm looking for? I think you have, I think you have a personal anchor to the subject. I want to say yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was wondering what word you were going to say. I was going to say experiences, pain, body. Well, first of all, welcome, elaine. It's so wonderful to have you today and I'm so happy to meet you because I've watched Catherine and talked to her after your sessions and I've been listening to how it's been integrating into her life and her body and the impact it's had, and it's been absolutely gorgeous to witness. So, thank you, you're a magician.
Speaker 3:Ah, that's the highest compliment, thank you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're so welcome. I'm so happy that you're here because belly has been such a big journey for me. I grew up and I was my body was always. I'm very tall, I'm 5'10" and I was always tall, even when I wasn't 5'10", I looked tall and I was super skinny and I used to be upset because I was too skinny, you know. And as I grew older and then after I had my babies, suddenly my body was different and suddenly I had this belly. And into my 30s I suddenly had this belly and I I didn't. It was different. It was like a new experience for me and I didn't like it and I've been wrestling with that really for since then and it's been painful.
Speaker 2:It's been a painful journey to not like a part of your body or be embarrassed by a part of your body or suck in your your stomach. And when katherine and I have been doing these self-love episodes, the women that we've had on every episode, belly came up. I think it's such a source of pain for women our bellies and I think that all the media, all the messaging of the world tells us to have a certain kind of body and I think, specifically belly is one of those that they really target, that it should look a certain way and that you're beautiful if your belly looks a certain way. And I have a hundred percent internalized that in my life and one of the earliest ways that I made peace with it was in a strange way. I would look at my mother's body and my grandmother's body. Her mother and I would notice, oh they, oh, they have puffy bellies as well. So I called it the Miller curse that was my family name, the Miller curse and somehow that made me it was like my my early step of accepting it. And now when I look back on that, I think, wow, it wasn't a curse at all, but it was part of my journey of accepting my body.
Speaker 2:And now I'm at this place where I'm menopausal I'll be 56 in a few weeks and I'm like, really, I'm sitting here rubbing my body, rubbing my belly, my body rubbing my belly, and it recently came into my sphere that our bellies hold so much wisdom.
Speaker 2:Not that long ago, I would say in the last year, or maybe that's when I was able to hear it in the last year and my daughter's been working on her body and she said to me once I'm not holding my belly in anymore and she doesn't, and it's so inspiring to me and I work on that. I'm always working on not holding my belly in and loving my belly. So when I heard about you having this belly wisdom and I thought, wow, we can really not not just not hate our bodies and our belly, but but open up to this is actually part of our body, that has wisdom and knowledge and magic and is like our source. I don't know, I don't have the answers. I'm hoping maybe you'll educate us a little bit, but that's a little bit of my journey, of how I got here and why I wanted you to be here and I'm so grateful that you are. I have a lot more stories and stuff to share because this, this has been so such a deep part of my journey.
Speaker 3:Thanks. There are so many things I could touch on and what you said. I just want to come back to the Miller curse. I would say kudos, because you found a way to have a sense of humor about something that was disturbing to you, and I think that's really necessary.
Speaker 3:With anything in life, when we've lost our sense of humor, I think it's a bad point. We're at a bad place if we can't laugh at ourselves in a healthy way. But yeah, you have to be careful that words mean something, and so if you're constantly associating the word curse with a part of you, you know you can start to wonder what effect might that be having actually on my body. So what you describe, and fabulous for your daughter, that she's, what a victory to say I'm not holding in my belly anymore. That just makes me want to stand up and cheer, because so many of us do it, men and women, but especially women and sometimes I wonder where do people learn this? You know, especially today, I would imagine. It seems to me there's so much more acceptance, there's so much more body acceptance going on, and yet I see woman after woman who comes on my table with a very similar story to what you're talking about for different reasons. You know everybody has a slightly different reason that they, if they've got a reaction or a strange thing going on with their abdomen. There are many, many reasons for that, but the fact is for many women it's a problem area, it's problematic, whether they've got endometriosis or they have painful periods, or they had a difficult pregnancy or a cesarean, or they don't have any children and that's an issue. They were sexually traumatized or abused, or simply had difficult sexual experiences, or there's weight there that they're not comfortable with. They don't like the way it looks, or they feel that they should not like the way it looks, or they've been made to feel ashamed. The list is long for reasons why women react.
Speaker 3:I use the word react react to their bellies, because we can all react in different ways. We can suck the belly in, as you mentioned and as your daughter was doing for a while. Right, so it was automatic. You know the mental girdle or it's more than mental, it's physical, but the putting on the girdle of holding in your vital organs is what it comes down to. You know you're squeezing in your transverse colon, you're cutting off access to your reproductive system, you're blocking your possibility to digest your experience and your food right. So when you do this act of holding your belly in unless you're doing Pilates or you're picking up a big bag of something, right you don't need to be holding your muscles like that on a regular basis. And if you do it long term or you do it often enough, you can start to do some damage to your body and have symptoms.
Speaker 3:So some women suck it in, some women cut off from that area, so there'll be a sort of numbness or just like it's a no man's land, not to, you know, a no woman's land. It's a no-go zone. Let's say they don't feel it. They just don't feel they can feel above it, they can feel their legs. But if I put a hand on a woman's belly, sometimes she just says I don't know. I say what's going on in there? What do you feel? I don't know. Feel your hand, but it's just this mystery. You know a place that some women don't want to go again for many, many different reasons. So there are many stories of why we might cut ourselves off from that part of ourselves and there are many ways of doing it. But I can assure you that it's unfortunately a very common thing. So yeah, I mean, I don't know what else. Ask me a question. How might I proceed?
Speaker 2:I love that, first of all, that's so interesting. Proceed. I love that, first of all, that's so interesting. It's so interesting the range of women and when you put your hands on their belly and some women can't feel that at all and it's really such a beautiful way to see how our emotions connect to our actual physical body that by holding in our belly it's actually causes damage in our body. I don't know that I ever thought of that and they said cutting off possibility. And, like our genius, can you talk about the wisdom of our bellies like what our bellies hold, like that we want to cut ourselves off from, but actually I'm feeling like it's something we can actually lean into and receive wisdom.
Speaker 3:Word wisdom, yeah, I guess I think wisdom I tend to associate with a more mental thing, but of course that's not true, because we know that the body is wise and there's body wisdom. So, okay For the belly. We often think of it more in terms of intuition. All right, that it's the seat of our intuition. We talk about making decisions from the gut. I felt it in my guts, right. Well, where are your guts? They're right down there where you're sucking yourself in, right, that's your guts. We get ideas from you know, deep in our bowels, right? I would say it's a place of a deep kind of knowing. That's not intellectual knowing. You know, people say I had this feeling. Right, you feel something, you intuit it, and that kind of thing doesn't come from your head and I would say it doesn't even come from your heart. It comes from lower down and as much as we can say that something comes from a particular area of the body, I would say those things come from the lower abdomen. The uterus, for women, obviously, is a place of creation. So it's a very special place where something very special can happen. Yeah, a place of reproduction and creation.
Speaker 3:For example, I can bring in my Zen experience in the Zen meditation that I practiced, we practiced sitting meditation with a very particular mudra, which is a hand position. You'd put one hand inside the other, with your palms up and your thumbs touching, as though you were holding like half a grapefruit, let's say, and you would put your two hands, the edges of your hands, right against the area that we're talking about, so below your navel and this area. So you're making that little grapefruit or egg shape. You're putting your hands right on the area that the Japanese call the kikai tanden. It's the infinite ocean of energy. So, in many, many different cultures, this space is, you know, male or female. This space is packed with energy, right? Your ki, you could say your ki comes from here. Your energy, so yeah, wisdom in that sense. So yeah, wisdom in that sense, it's the center, the gravitational center of your body is there, right? So it's a very, very important area and, once again, if we're cut off from it, you know, how do you know what you feel exactly? How do you know what you've taken in from your experience? How do you know what's going on in the atmosphere around you? So I think, even when we talk about grounding, for example, you know feeling, wanting to feel anchored, wanting to feel solid and grounded. We think you can think of your feet or your legs, but I think often when we talk about being grounded, we're talking about a feeling in that area, which also corresponds to the lower back. I mean, if you're holding in your belly, you may likely be holding in your back as well. The body doesn't know front side and back side, it's all one. So there's also this lower part that has a lot to do with being grounded and being relaxed in the true sense of the word. So it's important to wisdom in all of those senses.
Speaker 3:And the other important thing that I want to say, and the other important thing that I want to say in my work I work with a system of elements. So I look at the body and life experience in terms of earth, water, fire and air. So the belly is water and what that corresponds to, in addition to the emotions and the other things that I've mentioned intuition and deep sensing it corresponds to fear and for me, fear is not a dirty word. Fear is a good and necessary thing. Dirty word, fear is a good and necessary thing, and fear is also a big reason why we cut off from our bellies, right, if we're afraid of something and we don't want to feel that fear. Fear is something that rises up in your body. It wants to come up, rise up, give you the warning, make you take action if you need to right. And then it's meant to go back down again. If we cut it off, all kinds of mayhem can ensue, and I think it's important to look at that fear that comes from the belly as a kind of wisdom. You know, to be afraid to touch a hot stove a second time is very wise, it's a smart thing to do, right.
Speaker 3:And the fear of you know you meet somebody and you get this feeling that comes from your gut, right, something comes up and you go oh, I just got to chill, you know, and maybe there's something. You can't explain it, but it's. I don't want to be alone with this person, or I don't trust this person, or maybe I have to be on my guard with this person. And if you know yourself well enough and you can filter out what are the true messages and what may be yourself talking to yourself, that's good fear. So that's the wisdom also that comes from the belly. You know you all are here for desire, right, if you want to talk about desire. You can't talk about desire without fear.
Speaker 3:As soon as we desire something, a fear comes. It must it must Because as soon as you want something, there's the possibility you're not going to get it. There's the possibility you're going to get it and be disappointed. There's the possibility that you get it and lose it, right. So all and all of that comes. You don't have to sit and think about it. It comes, it's born with the desire and that fear comes from your belly. It's born with the desire and that fear comes from your belly.
Speaker 3:But the irony is, if you don't have that fear, you're not very likely to move towards the desire. You need to feel the fear and go towards the desire anyway, because that fear is going to also motivate you. The fear, if you allow it, is going to make you want to do it right. It's going to. It's also excitement, fear, right. It's also what we feel when we fall in love. It's also what we feel before we go out on stage, right, stage fright, it's that. It's that wah, something intense, right? So fear and desire are intimately connected and that's to me also an aspect of the wisdom of this part of our body that we again often cut off from because we don't know how to deal with it and we're afraid of the fear. All right, so fear is good, fear of fear not so good.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for laying all of that out. Fear is such wisdom and if we're not afraid of it, the fear of the fear is really the dangerous part. I love how you said that and you're right Leading into desire. There is fear, and I think that's what motivates us, is that feeling that we want to get past it, and that feeling of accomplishment, like I did it. I did that thing that I didn't ever think I could do, and then that's how we grow, growing to be the person who can have your desires. Yeah, so thank you for laying all of that out. How did we get here? How do you see that we got here of women holding in their bellies, like that? I mean, I know how I did and I'm sure I have way more to learn about it, but how do you see women in general, that we got here in this place of cutting off this part of our body that has all of our intuition?
Speaker 3:That's a really good question. Perhaps more than any other part of the body in terms of aesthetics, I suppose that the belly is a place that people look at and I don't know this attitude has developed that it's for some reason it's not something that should be seen. You know, like we used to say about kids, they should be seen and not heard. So it's the opposite for the belly you don't want to see it or hear it. But then again, these aesthetics change over time. So there were times in history when it was fine to have a belly. You know, if you look at a Rubens painting or many other works of fine art and statues, you know having a belly is fine. So I would say it's perhaps a very modern and fairly, you know, relatively recent problem. I'm not sure that our, you know, female ancestors hundreds of years ago were walking around feeling self-conscious about their bellies. I just, I don't think so. So I would say it's a contemporary problem, coming from societal pressure, I mean. And why does that happen, gosh, I don't know. We could say that about so many things you know, about so many physical attributes that people put judgment on. Why has it turned into that? I'm not really sure, you know I'm not sure I can explain it the other reasons that I listed earlier.
Speaker 3:You know why women turn against themselves in terms of their lower abdomens? Yeah, things like you, things like sexual abuse or trauma pain, those things I think have unfortunately always existed. They just weren't talked about. I really suspect it was more like well, shut up and deal with it. Women tried to deal with their pain as best they could. Sexual abuse, I think, largely went on. It was a taboo to speak about. It was a taboo to speak about. So I can't explain it historically why, but perhaps it seems more prevalent because we're talking about things more. I would suspect that that we are able that's a good thing that's happened over time is that we're able to speak our truths and talk about our experiences and maybe question what's normal. I don't like the word normal, but we can question what's really reasonable to shut up and put up with and what actually maybe we can do differently, if that makes sense.
Speaker 2:It makes complete sense and it's so good to talk about this. I don't hear this talked about a lot, and more and more I do hear people and my friends talking about our bellies. You know, artists painting bodies. You're seeing this more on Instagram. People want more of what's real and people women I'm talking about women mostly because I can't speak for men embracing their bellies a little bit more these days.
Speaker 2:I'm seeing this more and I'm also open to it, so I am personally seeing it more. I'm sure not everybody is having that experience, but I really want to give voice and I don't know Catherine's experience on this, but for me it's been a really painful spot and I really want to everyone I speak to, every woman I speak to and I've been talking about our self-love series a lot because I'm so proud of it and I think it's so beautiful. Every woman is like oh the belly, oh the belly, such a painful spot because it's expected to look flat. That's crazy town, that's crazy. I had two babies 29 and 27 years ago. My belly never was flat again and that's fine. I have embraced it more like, oh, this is my medal of honor, like I carry my babies here and I love them so much and I wouldn't change that for a flat belly on at all.
Speaker 2:Um, and I have this time in my thirties where my kids were little and I was wearing overalls and I felt so cute in them and somebody came up to me and asked me if I was pregnant. I was not and oh, that was that sent me into a really big shame spiral and that happened many times over the next 10 years because I was young enough where I still could be having children. I mean, maybe I am now, maybe maybe I look that way now, even though I cannot could be having children. I mean, maybe I am now, maybe I look that way now, even though I cannot have any more children. But I went home and I threw out those overalls. I threw them out, I donated them. I never wore them again and it's so sad because I loved them, I really looked cute and I threw out the overalls, but I kept the shame and I've been sitting with that ever since and I went through this whole decade long journey of every now and then, maybe every year or so, somebody saying, oh, are you expecting, are you pregnant? And I think people ask women that all the time and I don't know what it's like for other women, but for me it was embarrassing, like something's wrong, like I look pregnant and I'm not and I shouldn't look this way. And I worked with it for many years and I got to this point in 2019, I did some writing about it that I was reading before this where I started to say no, I'm not pregnant, but thank you for noticing how I glow, because pregnant women are glowing.
Speaker 2:And that was like, like all of these steps, the Miller curse, that going to Miami with a group of women once in a community and seeing this woman who was about triple my size, wearing only a hot pink thong and owning it like I had never seen a woman own it before, and I was in my suburban tankini with a lot of material to cover up the parts and look a certain way, and that day changed something in my cells.
Speaker 2:She was wearing also a boa, I have to say a hot pink thong and a boa, and it really changed something for me. So it's been like this slow journey of seeing what's possible. So talking about this embracing our bodies, opening to a new way, for me has been really healing. And I wouldn't say I'm all the way there yet, I wouldn't say that you know. I wouldn't say I'm all the way there yet I wouldn't say that you know, but I'm here enough where I want to talk about it and I I know that this is a source of pain for women listening because they've told me, catherine, anything that you want to share.
Speaker 1:So much has come up for me and you know, as with most of our topics, my experience is so different. So, for the listeners that don't know, I have ovarian cysts. So in 2004 was the first time that I was cut open cesarean because my endometrial cyst was about 25 centimeters, and after that surgery I've had cysts come back, etc. So my uterus is swollen to about if I were about four months pregnant. So for me it was just like this is just my belly. There was no other way. There was no way to suck it in.
Speaker 1:In 2009, I had a cancer scare and I decided that I wasn't going to be operated on anymore. So it was like I'm not going to be operated on anymore. And with that decision came I will have a forever belly. And it was just. It was an acceptance, it was like in order for me to be on this earth and live in this way. And when I say live in this way, what am I exactly saying? I guess living in the way that I was no longer going to go with what Western medicine was suggesting, which the suggestion was continued to be cut open to me felt was just absolute insanity. We weren't getting anywhere. Why was I going to continue doing that.
Speaker 1:It was such a painful act to begin with Like recovering from the surgeries was so difficult. They're cutting through all the different layers of muscle and then my muscles would have to strengthen again to the point where I could stand erect. Walking was hard, lifting five gallons was hard. So many things were hard over and over again, and just for mathematical I had that happen three times and that's when I said no, I'm not doing this anymore. So for me, my belly has been a sign of I set FU to a system and I have a swollen uterus and it's as if it's swollen for months. And this is just what I have.
Speaker 1:I'm very comfortable naked, like on my own or with a partner, and but I'm not a person who dresses in a very provocative way. I've always had a more grandma kind of style, short of from my teenage years. I like to be in sweats and I like to be super comfortable, and so it's never been like I'm covering up this specific piece of my belly. It's more like I want to schlep around and do whatever I'm doing unless this specific piece of my belly. It's more like I want to schlep around and do whatever I'm doing unless I'm at my gala, so it has been a piece of my life, but it hasn't been a blaring like like if somebody asked me, oh, are you pregnant? It wouldn't send me into a Shane spiral. I in my head would probably be like, no, I have tons of keloid scar tissue there, like for years I couldn't even feel that part of my belly, not because I was sucking it in or, as Elaine says, like not because I've worked with Elaine right, she'll ask me what do you feel?
Speaker 1:And I'm able to really describe certain things that are happening. But I can go into the reasons why. That is in a little bit kind of for listeners to have an idea of the level of background that I have around my belly. But around the scar from the place I was cut open, it was as if it was numb, like when you get a charley horse or your skin goes, your legs go numb because you're sitting in a particular way and you cut off the circulation. That's how it felt around the scar. So I used to like massage around it, trying to get that keloid tissue to sort of soften.
Speaker 1:But I'm just going to bring in some context of my own knowledge of my own body and my own belly. So in 2019, I started to practice yoga, along with Tai Chi and Qigong, a Korean method. So the belly is the donjon, it's sort of like where the fire is. Elaine was talking about it having the element of water, and I'm going to quote I think Montauk Chia is his name, one of the people that I've studied with and through this breathing that we do, which, like you, expand your belly and suck it and expand and suck, expand and suck there's this particular breathing. It's almost a well, it is meditative, but it has a certain rhythm, sort of like that, and you're you're working with this fire in your belly and that and what you're expecting is that fire is sort of making that water condense and it goes up and there's a circulation that happens in your system. It's almost like a cauldron. The fire is warming up this water and it's bubbling and there's this heat and what we're looking for is the circulation, and that circulation is what provides power, and the power is healing because it heals your kidneys, because just think about our country and our culture's obsession with coffee and adrenaline in the body, right when we have this fear come in, which is also in that part of the body. You get afraid of the bear or the tiger or I don't know, your LSATs or your SATs or something that's coming into your life. You have this fear and then all of your energy goes to your extremities, brain being one of them, so that you know how to act and move right. And there's this piece of you that's like, okay, I'm going for the thing. Or, as Elaine was talking about desire, I'm going for the thing. Or I'm not going for the thing, I'm going to go into my shell, or you know what? I'm just going to feel the fear and do it anyway.
Speaker 1:There's so much that occurs in this part of our body. Today, we're somewhat talking about the aesthetics and how the aesthetics can be a place of soreness for women. And, yes, I can see the potentiality for a woman saying to herself uh-oh, this particular body type got me in trouble, I was violated, right this wave, and I just don't want to feel that anymore. I'm going to cut myself off, and you're cutting yourself off not just from belly, but belly genitalia. I haven't necessarily had that experience, but it is very common, right. One out of every three women, and I think the numbers are like one out of every six or one out of every seven men, and I'm just bringing in this, like this stat, to sort of ground the fact that the sense of violation has happened over many centuries. It's not just of today. Today, as Elaine so generously spoke about, is something that we're talking about, but it has happened. So it is a place of fear where we can't really anchor as much as we could before.
Speaker 1:Elaine spoke also about erectness or having a sense of grounding. I feel like a very grounded individual sense of grounding. I feel like a very grounded individual and I'm just going to talk a little bit about my work with Elaine for listeners and because Brenda and I talk about it now. When Elaine and I were talking, she says oh, you have a lot of fear and grief trapped in here, and that felt true, right, I have this, I have this belly and I have the factual pieces of, like, endometriosis and cysts and surgical trauma, etc. I also do energy work around it and there are still so many layers to look at and it's probably gonna be a continual practice to I don't know when, like until I don't know. I don't know what it's gonna look like, I don't know what the thawing pieces will look like, and I am now 50. And I've been dealing with this part of my body since I was 19, because from 19 to 30, or maybe it was like 33 when I had my first surgery I don't really know when the cysts came on board or because we don't really know something's there until you're looking for the problem right.
Speaker 1:I was also fairly slender as a kid, you know pre-operations, and so I never really had to deal with like I didn't necessarily have washboard abs. I was always curvaceous, but I wasn't necessarily a big woman, just like 125, 130. At my highest before surgeries, I was like in my 130s, which is really small. Now I'm a bigger woman and it just feels like it's part of like the woman that I am. I'd have to change so many things in order to be smaller and I just don't feel like it.
Speaker 1:I don't feel the desire or the need for it right now, and so I just want to say that so many things happen in this place of our body. It does have wisdom and it is connected. You know, if we want to start talking about seven generations forward, seven generations back, we want to talk about you know where healing generational patterns that are, behavioral patterns, addictive patterns, familial trauma, trauma of how different parts of the family interconnect, or the things that our generations have been trying to work through. If we add that with the body pain of generations that came before us, around belly, whether male or female, it just feels like a huge and we could look at it either direction right, like a huge gift, a huge treasure chest, or like a Russian doll, like we take off one layer and there's just another layer, and take out another layer and there's just another layer, and you just I don't know what you're going to remember. Is it Matryoshka? Say that, brenda.
Speaker 2:Matryoshka, the Russian dolls, yep and it's exactly like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So the things that are coming up for me right now, as we chat about this is hopefully our listeners will feel the spark and the desire to potentially not hold their bellies in, maybe feel the spark and the desire to feel into. Do I have fear or grief? Because it's water and fire in the belly to feel and explore. Is there something coming up for me where I could potentially be with myself here without cutting myself off? Because by cutting myself off from potential fear or potential grief, I'm also cutting myself off from my own intuition, cutting myself off from the cauldron, cutting myself off from my own creation center and my own wisdom center, point.
Speaker 1:I hope that today's conversation brings people closer to oh, my closer to. There's something here for me to explore and, further away from, there's something here for me to judge and have to love and accept, because I would love for people to just get curious. I would love for people to just get curious, like it's not even about the perfection of I know what's in there and I got the answer, or I have flat abs, so I'm amazing. More of what's here for me to really be with and, yes, is something clicking for you, elaine.
Speaker 3:I see some facial. When Brenda was speaking earlier, it occurred to me that, again, there's a wide range of reasons why we might be, as a woman, we might be uncomfortable with our bellies, but what you two have in common even though you have very different stories, but what I hear is a common factor is the aspect of change. Right, you both went through a change of change, right, you both went through a change having children, having an operation, having a medical condition right, and this change, or these changes, put you both in front of something different physically that you then had to decide how to deal with, right? So that, again, that's not going to be everybody's story, but it may be a lot of women's story. And so when you I love Catherine, when you say be curious, you know it would you would hope that people might be curious about okay, what's going on here, what have I got here? And so I would encourage women to have a look at, have a look at it that way, if you've got an antagonist or an unhappy relationship with your belly, first of all you know what happened, like, how did you get to this place and is there something you can change about it? Because that makes a big difference as well.
Speaker 3:If you wanted to, could you change something? All right, if you really are unhappy about it, could you change something? All right, if you, if you really are unhappy about it, could, could you do something to change it? And that would indicate a certain line of action or a certain approach or right. And if you can't, then it's the, it's yeah, then it's um. Well, so who am I now? Well, so who am I now? Because this is what there is. So who am I now with this body? Right, I personally don't have a lot of issues with my belly. I had other issues. I was bullied as a kid because I had a big nose and flat chest. So my areas of you know, shame and not liking myself are a little bit higher up, and in my era they weren't easily changed. I wasn't going to have a nose job or breast enlargement, so I had to learn to live with my big nose and my small chest.
Speaker 3:And learning to live with that not just suck it up and get on with it, but embracing it, I think, as you said, up and get on with it, but embracing it, I think, as you said, catherine, or getting behind it, owning it that's a fabulous thing in life, that's a great lesson, that's an important experience to learn how to own your body.
Speaker 3:It's you right. So if you can get behind you, even if you don't recognize it anymore, even if other people mistake you for something that you're not, even if you feel like you have to explain or it makes you feel uneasy, but if you can find a way to get behind that, because you can't change it maybe, or maybe you don't want to change it, but to really be comfortable, to work through the shame, whatever it takes, to accept yourself. I will use the word acceptance because I think it's valid to be curious about yourself and who this new person is, if you're here because something has changed right. I think that's an extremely valuable life lesson and a wonderful way to look at something that might otherwise be a constant source of discomfort and even dis-ease unease. So I think it's very interesting that your stories, as different as they are, they both involve this element of change and what we become and what we make of what we become.
Speaker 2:Thank you. What a beautiful frame. How you found the similarity in our stories. It's really beautiful. I love what you said. How could you embrace our bodies? Whatever the part is for you that you have trouble with maybe it's belly, maybe it's something else, um, I I have a practice that I, when I noticed I'm holding my belly in, I noticed that I just like, ooh, can I just let it out, right? And I have another practice where I rub my belly and I just like love, how soft she feels, and I just rub her and I'm like I love you. And that's one of my two of my practices that I do. And I'm curious if you have any practices that you would be willing to share around, how women can embrace, loving their belly a little bit more maybe.
Speaker 3:Yeah, sure, well, again, the best thing you can do for yourself if you have a difficult relationship with any body part, but especially with your belly, is come to it, come towards it, but especially with your belly, is come to it, come towards it, hold it in your awareness, be willing to be with it. So, whatever that means putting a hand on it, being willing to touch it to, yeah, to rub it, to make circles, to poke your fingers into it, especially to breathe into it. To you know, place your hands below your navel, let go, and when you inhale, feel your hands swell out and when you exhale, feel your hands come back towards the center of your body. And just some simple abdominal breathing and not contracting, noticing if you're holding. Um, those are, those are the main things.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but having it in your attention, having that area in your awareness, knowing how, paying attention to the, you know, is it gurgling, is it making sounds? Um, have you gone to the toilet? Do you need to go to the toilet? You know, like the basic needs, you know all of that is super important.
Speaker 2:Gorgeous Thank you. I know that's going to be so useful to our listeners. Is there anything that we haven't touched on? Where you're like? Oh, I want everyone to know about this.
Speaker 3:I did flash, catherine, when you mentioned your scar, and I just want to say to you personally come back to Paris and let me work on your scar, because we can work on that Again.
Speaker 3:You know your body and for anybody who's got a scar anywhere your body, when you get cut, whether it's by a surgical knife or a piece of glass because you put your hand through a window, your body's doing the good thing by rushing, sending the army in to patch up the intrusion, but because it's working so fast, it just like throws the cells together in a very fast way and that's why we develop a scar, because the tissue, you know, it's thrown together really quickly and woven together fast and so we often have numbing around a scar.
Speaker 3:It's very, very common, sometimes ridges, sometimes what we call adhesions, so like the skin around the scar will kind of stick, like it can't move, the fascia and the skin aren't movable, and that can be worked on, I mean through body work. That's a little difficult to do over the internet, but with a good body worker or even yourself, I would encourage you to keep giving your scar some love, you know, and some nice oil and just keep kind of working away at it. So that's important. You don't have to necessarily live with numbness around a scar, a cesarean, for example. Cesarean scars are really common as well.
Speaker 1:Thank you for that and I will just share that. Yes, I do. I do work with castor oil sometimes castor and coconut or castor and jojoba or jojoba, however they pronounce it. A little bit of a mixture, but enough so that it's smooth enough, but at the same time it's going to have enough tautness, or it's like taut enough that you can actually grab the skin and knead it in a particular way so that it gets softer. That's a whole. I mean, massaging your belly in a particular way is a whole different episode. But yes, thank you for that, and at the same time I would love to go back to Paris and have somebody work on it. Working on it yourself is one thing, having somebody else work on your body is just so. It's just different level of care. People, let's just be honest. It's a completely different level of care. But yeah, yes, I potentially at some point, brenda and I will will have to do an episode on what it means to, as a woman, just massage all the different areas of your body, right, because I think when we see it, I think of the I can't remember, is it Calgon? I don't remember the commercial of like a woman massaging herself or something. It's like really soft, but when you're massaging a scar or you're, you're really wanting to need a place that you think potentially is holding trauma, like holding emotions, and it's trapped inside People listeners, I'm sorry, it's really not like a soft and loving, it's a more of like kneading dough kind of you know, holding and breathing into the spot and then like letting that location go and feeling if you feel the emotion that's underneath and it can be really tender. So if somebody is practicing this, I want to say go slowly and go at your own pace and if you hit a pocket whether it's grief or rage or fear or sadness, fear or sadness Be with it and tap out, like be with it, feel it, tap out and pick it up another day, because this is if you have, if you haven't caught on to this today, I'm going to say it again for the people in the back. This is a forever practice. There is no I got there or I'm there yet, or oh, I did this exercise and I'm on the other side of it, because this is part of the process, of how the body processes.
Speaker 1:So we've come into this conversation speaking about bellies or the little pouch that women have, and it technically happens. I don't want to get in. I mean, my brain is going to these places. I don't want to go into whole pedo land. But our bodies change because we can carry a child.
Speaker 1:It's sort of like a fat deposit. That's saying you are now a vessel of creation and you can hold another human Prior to that. We don't have that. We're scrawnier because we're prepubescent, like we're little girls. Right, we don't have the fat deposits because we're not ready to hold and create life.
Speaker 1:Likewise, same sort of transition for men. Right, they're little boys and they're super scrawny and they can't even hold fat because they're not meant to hold that kind of body weight, because they're not going to war yet or they're not protecting and providing for a home. They're not the male at the door that someone has to like say, hey, can I come in? They're not the security guard holding the family tight. They're scrawnywny and they have a scrawny body, and so they could say where's my bicep or where's my big thigh, or how come my calves aren't growing in?
Speaker 1:Well, you're not there yet, right, like you're not at that place in your life where your body's but your body will change with age. There is something that happens for us and I just want to remind everyone, like the body has so much wisdom and the mechanics that are occurring are occurring because it's a different stage of life and we are somewhat societal obsessed with youth, like prepubescent youth, of the way the female body looks and the way the male body looks. But we do mature and in that maturing we have different potential archetypes that are coming at play, and so the body represents that change. You know, and I can't say thank you enough, elaine, I know that Brenda has the last question she wants to ask. Thank you so much for adding that piece for everyone knowing that, yes, there are some exercises that we can do and Brenda, Thank you, catherine.
Speaker 2:I actually don't have any more questions. I mean I do, but I feel like we've covered so much today and we're leaving at such a beautiful point. I'm actually leaving with some questions that we've shared here today, which is what is here for me to be with? What happened in my belly? How did I get here? Do I want to change anything and what could I change? And who am I now? And so we're here just offering this possibility of looking at our bellies, feeling into our bellies in a different way than we ever have before, and this conversation has been so enlightening and part of my own healing. So thank you, elaine. Is there anything else that you want to say, and perhaps how people can contact you?
Speaker 3:No, I don't have anything to add. That's a beautiful summing up from from both of you. That list of questions is is great. Um, people can contact me via my website, so I think you'll you link in the show notes, and I love for people to read my newsletter. It's how I communicate with people. It's free, it's monthly, I don't spam and I love to write. I express myself even better, let's say well, in writing. I'm not sure how articulate I've been today orally, but I love to write and every issue is a love letter to the people who read it. So your readers are more than welcome to come and join and read what I have to say about my practice and about life. That would make me really happy to have some new subscribers, so that's where they can get in touch on my website.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Well, I will be one of those new subscribers for sure. I can't wait to read your wisdom and it's been an absolute pleasure for you to be here today and share your knowledge and your expertise and your experience and your wisdom. I'm really grateful. Thank you so much, thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:Thank you, thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Thank you, elaine, thank you Brenda, thank you, listeners, for being on today. I also want to leave everyone with. I'm going to add two things to what Brenda was saying. Her list of questions here what can I be curious about about my body, my belly? Where's my curiosity? What can I lean into and what can I get accept? What am I ready to really accept and own as mine as part of my own healing, and how can I just love myself more? Thank you so much, everyone, for listening. Until next time. Until next time.
Speaker 2:Thank you for joining us on the Desire is Medicine podcast.
Speaker 1:Desire invites us to be honest, loving and deeply intimate with ourselves and others. You can find our handles in the show notes. We'd love to hear from you.
